2013 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award - The Pitch

In 2011, my novel THE COMING made it to the Quarterfinals round in the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award (ABNA) contest (top 250 of 5,000 entries).  This year, I'm submitting my second novel, THE MENGELE EFFECT.  Below is my "pitch", which is what the judges will use to make their initial cut:

THE MENGELE EFFECT

Science Fiction/Fantasy/Horror Category

The mutations begin in a Kansas City salvage yard.

Hours later, the light of day reveals a dead city, stripped of life by creatures torn from the pages of a nightmare.  On this night, the gates of Hell swing wide and release the spawn of mankind's hate to pour across the Midwest in an unstoppable, ravenous wave, slowed only by the sun's killing light.  A quiet, peaceful evening in America’s Heartland becomes—as the few remaining survivors would later recall—the last night humanity would rule the planet.

Carolyn Ridenour fights a daily battle to keep America safe from the world's tiniest, most fearsome weapons.  Ordered to Kansas City to investigate the unfolding horror, she barely escapes the creatures' nocturnal onslaught, saved at the last instant by Colonel Garrett Hoffmann, a man who'd witnessed the slaughter of hundreds of his troops—and innocent civilians—under the creatures' horrific advance.  President Andrew Smith, former Navy Admiral and battle-scarred hero, watches as city after city is literally eaten alive, the military’s conventional might useless against a swarming foe that inexplicably—and exponentially—replenishes its numbers every twenty-four hours.  Frantic for answers, the President is pushed towards the unthinkable by members of his own government…trusted advisors who have long prayed for this day, each members of an ancient order sworn to destroy civilization in order to save their own souls.

Carolyn and her team race to find a way to stop the creatures—products of perverse, decades-old genetic research performed in Auschwitz’s filthy labs, refined by Cold War enemies, and perfected by nature—before a co-opted President unleashes the fury of America's nuclear arsenal on his own soil...

And his own citizens.

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I'll find out on 13 Feb 13 if it makes the cut.  That's a lot of 13's...hopefully, it's a LUCKY number!